Patient Engagement

Cancer patients who used digital solutions to stay connected to their caregivers and report symptoms lived 6-7 months longer, says Dr. Johanna Mattson, director of Comprehensive Cancer Center at Helsinki University Hospital.

Aged-care provider Ryman Healthcare in New Zealand has built its own electronic care planning system that runs on 3,500 tablets deployed in residents’ rooms across its residential aged-care villages. The myRyman application has removed paperwork for both care planning and rostering and improved staff and resident satisfaction. The $20+ million project has seen wi-fi deployed across all Ryman’s villages and the organisation’s IT team grow from three to 60 people since 2015, when work first started. Clinical nurse specialist Victoria Brevoort said myRyman directs the care delivered in a resident’s room. When a staff member logs into the tablet they are presented with a schedule of tasks that need to be completed that day, as well as information about the resident, such as their interests and family. “People know much more clearly what they have to do and when they have to do it and it’s more accountable because they have to complete the task in the system,” she said. “It has freed up our staff to spend more time with the residents, one on one. They can record what they talk about in the system, so we see the resident as a person, rather than a collection of tasks we need to do for them.” Ryman corporate affairs manager David King said the organisation’s audit results have significantly improved since implementing the system, as 81 per cent of its villages now have four-year accreditation. The technology project is also generating a wealth of data that is being mined for insights. “We’ve discovered a whole load of data that we’ve never had before, and it’s a gold mine because it provides a closed loop between tasks and clinical outcomes,” King added. A central dashboard of information allows Ryman’s business intelligence team to identify any anomalies quickly, such as a spike in falls, which can then be investigated. Differences in performance between villages can also be interrogated in order to improve performance across the network, he explained. Chief executive Gordon MacLeod said that “not only has it done what it set out to do – get rid of paperwork – but the data we’re collecting from it means we better understand care outcomes and allow us to lift our standards of care even higher’’. This article first appeared on eHealthNews.nz.

The hospital transformed the culture by tasking teams with sponsoring values to create awareness about the need to strengthen patient satisfaction, according to CEO Matt Kelly and Director Jennifer McNamara.

The two women’s care organizations are blending their care operations to build on each other’s strengths. The vendor’s telehealth technology has helped decrease ER visits by 26%.

Koen Kas, founder of Healthskouts, says the aim is to "die young, but as late as possible" by utilizing digital technology to remove barriers and offer patients new experiences to make healthcare delightful.

Researchers' computational analysis has identified putative gene targets, which could be of therapeutic value for boosting NK cell anti-tumor immunity.

By creating a new engagement layer for agents, UnitedHealth was able to address workflow issues, making it possible for them to focus on customers more keenly.

They plan to share resources and jointly advocate for improved training, research and better rural health outcomes across country Victoria.

With remote patient monitoring a hot topic among healthcare providers, a new survey indicates patients would be open to outfitting themselves with wearable devices if it resulted in fewer trips to visit the doctor. WHY IT MATTERS The study of 100 participants ages 40 and over, conducted by connected healthcare solutions provider VivaLNK, found nearly two-thirds (64 percent) would put on a wearable health monitoring device if it meant it reducing the number of trips made to visit a doctor or hospital. Overall interest in wearables like a Fitbit or the Apple Watch for remote patient monitoring purposes was high, with more than half (55 percent) of respondents noting they would use such a device at home. THE LARGER TREND Healthcare organizations see the potential of RMS in combination with telehealth for convenience and cost savings, and many are currently exploring how to adopt it. In one case, use of an inhaler-connected sensor helped push the average number of COPD-related hospital trips down to an average of 2.2, compared to the year prior to study enrollment (when the average was 3.4), a recent study from the Cleveland Clinic medical center and Propeller Health found. For another example, ClearSky Medical Diagnostics currently employs Shimmer Research wearables for clinical trials, a partnership that uses Shimmer’s Verisense platform to improve analysis of sensor data for central nervous system diseases. And among the new products unveiled at HIMSS19 this past February was VitalConnect’s Vista Solution 2.0, which added a weight scale, blood pressure and pulse oximetry and core temperature reader to the existing eight vital sign measurements monitored by the company’s VitalPatch biosensor. However, there is evidence to suggest the potential benefits of RMS – not to mention the accuracy of certain devices or the security with which sensitive information is stored or transmitted – has not been fully studied.  "Remote patient monitoring … will be increasingly important," Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center CIO Dr. John Halamka wrote on his blog earlier this year. But while "many thought leaders are convinced that remote patient monitoring improves patient care," he said, "surveys suggest that health-care professionals are still not convinced." ON THE RECORD "Remote patient monitoring and the wearable devices that make it possible are not new concepts, but there's more progress that can be made by understanding patient motivations," Jiang Li, CEO of VivaLNK, said in a statement. "While the appointment can't always be avoided, RPM is the key to reducing the time, energy and money it takes to physically visit a doctor's office." As Li noted and the survey also indicated, costs of the appointment, distance, and disliking healthcare facilities were all top reasons survey respondents gave for wanting to reduce physical visits to the doctor. "Patients have always disliked visiting the doctor's office, and now there's a way to mitigate that,” Li continued. “This survey highlights what really fuels and drives consumer behavior from a healthcare perspective." Nathan Eddy is a healthcare and technology freelancer based in Berlin. Email the writer: nathaneddy@gmail.com Twitter: @dropdeaded209